––––––––
I’d received another letter from Charlotte. Its tone hinted at a festering anxiety and I knew immediately that something, or someone, had caused this worry. She desperately needed to speak to me, she said. Also, that from the States she’d spoken to Jonathan but said no more. I knew there was more.
Jonathan knew. He knew. But what I didn’t know was how far down the trail he’d travelled. Perhaps I should call Marek? I decided against it. I had no wish to bother him again. Ever again.
The safest thing I could do was move to a different hotel, one in the centre of Liverpool, so that I’d be nearer to the step-down unit, where Abbs had informed me on the phone the day before, Hemmings was being moved to. The impending removal of Hemmings from Littleworth had happened obscenely quickly.
With the knowledge that Jonathan was on to something I checked into the hotel under a different name. Picking a cheap bed and breakfast, and using cash, I was able to use any name I wanted. Who would I be? On a whim I chose Julia Roberts and saw Stanley smiling.
Every instinct told me Jonathan was near to knowing about Amanda.
‘You look a bit like Julia Roberts,’ the young woman said to me at the less than salubrious reception desk.
‘No one’s mentioned that before,’ I said, with a hint of amusement.
After checking in I put my bag in the room and went out to find an internet café. Having studied the regulations at The Monastery step-down clinic I knew I definitely needed new identification. They wouldn’t search me but would want to see proof of who I was, and I couldn't be Amanda. It was too risky now.
This would soon be over.
I peered at the computer screen, waiting for Razor’s reply. As if smelling my desperation through the ether Razor’s answer came back almost immediately. My new ID would be delivered to the address I’d given him – another PO Box at the main Liverpool post office – within twenty-four hours.
Then I composed an email to Tom Gillespie’s protected email address, giving him website and email addresses that Razor had given to me regarding the dark web, the trafficking of children and internet paedophilia. This time I didn’t delete or store in drafts. This time I sent it.
Collecting my things, I made my way back to the B&B.
—
The room was small. Much smaller than Mrs Xú’s, and the bed was even more uncomfortable. It didn’t matter. All that mattered now was that accessing Hemmings would be easier. The Monastery was a modern, purpose-built unit; although Abbs had assured me it being modern and new didn’t in any way mean it was any better supervised than Littleworth. He didn’t quite put it like that, but it’s what he meant.
I told him I’d be visiting under another name: Julia Roberts. Abbs questioned nothing, he wasn’t interested. All he was concerned about was keeping Michael Hemmings happy. And seeing Amanda kept him happy.
I’d ringed the date I was to visit Hemmings in my diary. I checked the small steak knife that I could easily hide in my sock, knowing I wouldn’t be searched. The blade was serrated and sharp.
Lying down on the gaudily patterned bedspread, I pushed the one thin pillow underneath my neck and aimlessly watched the clock tick from one minute to the next. I felt myself moving towards the sleep that was often so elusive, and my mind opening up. This time the memory was more real as I allowed myself to be me, and not watch as if someone else from afar.
It was another seven years before I mentioned the ‘Michael’ incident to my mother. Seven years; the cycles again. We had a day off school – for teacher training – I think. A woman we knew from church was coming round with her new baby. A girl, ten months old.
We all sat in the kitchen. My mother was baking. Nothing stopped her from doing what she wanted to do. The woman was perched, uncomfortably, on a kitchen stool, holding the rounded and happy baby. She’d been in our house for over an hour, but my mother still hadn’t even touched the bundle of joy. I had, cooing and stroking. I’d taken the baby into the garden, shown her the squirrels, but now we were both back in the kitchen, and its stifling closeness. The woman looked awkward. The baby began to cry, the woman said she needed feeding. She, inconspicuously, opened her top and the baby began to guzzle. My mother hadn’t offered for her to go in the lounge and breastfeed and I think the woman was scared of my mother, so she didn’t ask for privacy.
By now, my mother had finished making her apple pie. It was in the oven, the homely smell so incongruous with the real atmosphere. The kitchen was baking hot. My mother was now making homemade tomato sauce for spaghetti bolognese. I stood by the sink putting the tomatoes in a bowl, waiting for my mother to pour the boiling water from the kettle over them to loosen the skins. My mother made the same sauce once a week.
The woman chatted nervously, occasionally moving her baby upwards, underneath her wool sweater.
I don’t know what made me say it. My mother was waiting patiently for the kettle to finish boiling the water for the tomatoes.
‘How old will the baby be when you stop feeding her?’ I asked the woman, still busily plucking the green stalks from the tomatoes.
‘Not until she’s about one, maybe eighteen months,’ she replied, happy to chat.
‘And then you won’t feed anyone else?’ I asked.
She looked confused. My mother stood tall. I sensed, rather than saw, every muscle tighten from her neck downwards, her hand still on the kettle handle.
I carried on, feeling powerful. ‘So you wouldn’t feed anyone else? Only your own baby?’ I felt even braver. ‘And not a grown boy?
The woman shifted. My left hand was still in the bowl, holding a stalk, the bowl still in the sink. The kettle steamed, whistled. I didn’t see my mother quickly move the one step to the sink. I’d taken my right hand from the bowl to scratch my nose. My mother poured the boiling water over my left hand that still held the stalk. I felt as if I was silent for too long; it was the woman’s screech that activated my own. A few seconds later the pain consumed me, I looked downwards at my hand, already the skin beginning to blister and loosen, like the skin of the tomatoes.
My mother stood, watching, doing nothing. The woman was holding her baby close with one arm, and even through the pain I noticed a pink and pretty nipple poking out from underneath her jumper, so different from my mother’s. The woman turned on the cold water and ran it over my hand, shaking and crying.
My mother said nothing, not even sorry.
The woman called my dad, who was working locally, and he came home. The woman left, and never came back.
It was an accident, love, he’d said, but that night, one of very few, I heard Dad arguing with my mother. The incident wasn’t mentioned ever again. I never told anyone what had really happened. That my mother had deliberately poured boiling water over my hand because I’d revealed the odd secret between her and her nephew.
The pressure on my forehead was light, ethereal.
I love you, Mum.
My journey was not what I’d thought it would be and, in the midst of undulating sleep, I recognised there was a reason for everything, and nothing is as random as we tell ourselves it is. Nothing.